Full Pundit: Justin Trudeau, 'not a leader'?

Full Pundit: Justin Trudeau, 'not a leader'?

Off to a good startIn which one of Justin Trudeau’s very first flips is followed by a fairly spectacular flop.

The National Post‘s John Ivison envisions a Conservative attack ad in which Justin Trudeau is seen passionately defending the long-gun registry, and then declaring it a failure, and then it cuts “to a still picture of Mr. Trudeau looking like he’s about to drive off in the getaway car, accompanied by a Conservative Party voiceover: ‘Justin Trudeau will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, whenever you want to hear it. He’s not a leader.’” That, says Ivison, “will likely be the ball game” — and justifiably so, because let’s face it, the charge “is grounded in reality.” For a guy that light on policy to manage such an epic flip-flop does not bode at all well for his chances.

(As for Ivison’s suggestion that whenever Stephen Harper is “asked a question, he runs down his mental checklist of where he stands on any given subject and produces an answer that is invariably consistent with his previous public statements,” we’re so baffled that we don’t really know what to say!)

The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert reminds us that “Liberal strategists initially saw the registry as a promising wedge between their Conservative rivals and the large electoral markets of urban Canada.” Oopsie. “Over the past decade [Stephen] Harper has successfully turned that equation on its head, using the registry to drive the Liberals out of rural Canada even as his Conservatives were making significant inroads in the country’s gun-conscious suburbs and big cities.” (Serves them very, very right.) Hébert understands Trudeau’s conciliatory motivations in declaring the registry dead (even if everything else he said was a bloody mess). But she doubts other candidates will be willing to let it lie — and she’s right. Those will be some interesting debates.

It’s all very well for the New Democrats to mock the Conservatives’ “car tax” in retaliation for the Conservatives’ mocking the New Democrats’ “carbon tax.” But it drives home a different point, in Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne‘s mind: Neither party “is willing to admit that its environmental policies would cost consumers, as opposed to a handful of ‘big polluters’,” and both are equally offside the mainstream economic opinion that taxing carbon is the simplest and most effective way of reducing its consumption. In this sense both parties are unabashed economic populists, Coyne argues, and he doesn’t think Canada needs a third one of the same ilk. For heaven’s sake, there’s no one free-market capitalists can vote for!

Michael Harris, writing for iPolitics, brings disturbing news from Adscam “hero” Allan Cutler that “we have an epidemic of corruption at the federal level” that’s even “worse” than back in the Chrétien days, and that “whistleblowers are even more unwelcome now than they were then.” It’s agonizingly short on details, but Cutler claims to have “seen evidence” of “billion-dollar contracts that were decided at meetings where no minutes were kept” and of “helicopter maintenance contracts that were moved all around North America to increase the costs.”

Provincial affairs“As scandals go,” for all the Wildrose’s huffing and puffing and storming out of Question Period on Monday, the Edmonton Journal‘s Graham Thomson declares “tobaccogate” — Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s spot of bother over a contract awarded to her ex-husband’s law firm, and some misleading statements about same — “pretty weak stuff” that “should have been a story for a day or two,” and would have been but for poor message control. (Again, fellow Canadians, we really need to do something about our scandal names.)

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Braid thinks the Wildrose has a legitimate beef with legislature speaker Gene Zwozdesky, who “went against all his more lenient instincts — and precedents — time after time” in shutting down the opposition’s questions on the matter. But it’s not a very novel beef, in Braid’s view. “Anybody who’s surprised by all this hasn’t paid attention to the Alberta legislature for the past, oh, 40 years.”

Rob Breakenridge, writing in the Herald, isn’t a fan of the political technique whereby someone like Redford claims that serious and valid questions about her conduct are in fact “personal attacks,” and therefore somehow untoward. Seconded.

Duly notedWhereas “parents paying large fees to legitimate agencies as part of the adoption process has not translated into societal or legal acceptance of children being bought and sold like animals or inanimate objects,” and whereas embryo donation is widely seen as “an admirable and incredible gift to infertile couples,” the Post‘s Marni Soupcoff can’t understand why some people seem to be freaking out over a California clinic selling embryos from anonymous donors. Nor us.

Despite mounting evidence of the toll head injuries can take on athletes, The Globe and Mail‘s editorialistssay “it is nowhere near time to give up” on hockey and football for good. Phew!